Planning a wedding is supposed to be fun?!

I tottered down the aisle, thankful that I had chosen both my brother and my son to give me away – I needed a steady hand on each side! Nearing our destination, my eyes glistened joyfully as I met the gaze of the amazing man who would be my husband in just a short while. My brother and son stepped away in perfect tandem. I took one last step toward the floral arch and the love of my life . . . and fell off my shoes. As the captain and my fiancé leaped forward to catch my toppling body, I jerked awake. Sitting up in bed, gasping, I silently vowed to veto anything with heels more than two inches high or less than an inch wide! I am not a shoe person. I hate most of the “new styles.” I hate towering heels, pointed toes, square toes, adorning buttons and bows, and anything that looks like it belongs on the foot of a five-year-old. In addition, any shoe without an anchoring strap around my ankle soon goes sailing across the room. So what does that leave? Not much. Aside from the horrendous task of finding the perfect shoes, my wedding plans had been coming along nicely. Granted, we had a difficult time breaking out of the talking-about-things mode and getting into the actually-doing-things mode but when we hit the under-100-day mark, I was still feeling confident that we had plenty of time. Simultaneously, I was also feeling slightly frantic . . . When asked to explain the problem, I replied, “My fiancé is a man.” Most women understand what that implies: it meant his eyes glazed over every time I talked about menus, cakes, flowers, invitations, and everything else that entailed making a decision. Overwhelmed by the infinite details, he soon developed a standard routine: First he pretended to suddenly go deaf, dumb and blind. Next he would shrug and say, “You choose something.” Then, if I actually DID decide on something by myself, he immediately insisted on looking at all the other options (the ones I tried to show him a week before). Without fail, he ended up with exactly what I had originally chosen. After about four rounds of that particular sport, I was ready to forfeit the game and throttle him. Where did the months go? We had lots of time! We became engaged on August 29 and set our wedding date for the following July 26. It wasn’t a first marriage for either of us but we wanted our wedding to be special. We also wanted to keep it fairly small with only about 30 guests. Having almost eleven months to work with, we knew there would be no pressure at all. We could relax and enjoy the process of shopping around and finding all the perfect things for “us” – it was going to be wonderful! We initially set out to find a location in a mountain setting. But after looking at places with no facilities or with facilities that cost a small fortune (I am NOT paying a $1000 to rent a picnic table and outhouse in the woods for three hours!), we started looking at boats and the attractive one-stop-shopping wedding packages that come with them. We traipsed around everything from a dilapidated riverboat powered by a wind-up key, to a spacious luxury cruiser the size of a small aircraft carrier and with more glass windows than a Vegas casino. In the end, we booked a medium-sized yacht that would easily accommodate our small party. Signing on the dotted line suddenly made life so much easier! Well, maybe not that much easier . . .:  The captain would perform the ceremony so we didn’t have to shop for an officiant - but we did still have to write our vows and choose our ceremony.  We didn’t have to interview catering companies – but we did still have to decide on a menu and attend a tasting.  We didn’t have to sample the goods at umpteen cakeries, but we did have to search the internet, looking at thousands of cake photos until we found one similar to what we wanted.  Hosted bar or juice bar? We could have whatever we wanted to pay for (although my fiancé swore that if we wanted a hosted bar for his relatives, we would need to take out a loan the equivalent of the national debt of a small country). In the end, we opted to have a cash bar and let Cousin Jack get drunk on his own dime . . .  The florist was pre-selected – but what kind of flowers did we want? Should they have a special meaning or only be a certain color? How many did we want? Flowers on the cake? The tables? A floral arch? Loose petals strewn down the aisle? I didn’t even know how to choose my bouquet!  What about the photographer? The yacht has a choice of three. They all offered four rolls of film (OK, would that be four rolls of 12, 24 or 36?) but the first one does digital and the second one does black and white; the third one is not a professional photographer but a close personal friend of the captain who guarantees at least three great shots of the groom tossing the bride’s grandson overboard. How were we supposed to choose?  The boat had a nice sound system – but we still had to select three hours of music – preferably tunes that wouldn’t send our guests leaping off the boat with their hands clamped tightly over their ears. I suggested that we should at least have both kinds of music – country and western.  The invitations needed specific wording – but we could order them from any vendor we liked, choose any style we liked, or even make our own. Within a week, we had fifteen catalogs on our coffee table –three months later, we had sifted and sorted through all of them, ordered and received countless samples, and eventually narrowed it down to two possibilities. Eventually the judges awarded the grand prize – to the first one we had looked at. When it came to the other decision-making, we also had to deal with logistics. We live in the San Fernando Valley and the yacht was down in Newport Beach. It’s only fifty miles – but that was fifty miles we had to drive to meet with the cake person, food person, flower person, hair person, makeup person and of course, the yacht coordinator several times. Never have I wished more fervently for transporter technology . . . Beam me over, Scotty, I got wedding planning to do! And then there are all the things the yacht package didn’t include . . . Like favors! We wanted to use bookmarks with the Apache Wedding Prayer. We found a printer who could do them for slightly less than the cost of a new car, but in the process of designing what we wanted, we discovered that I could actually make them myself. Very cool! After adding up the cost of the special paper, printer ink cartridges, vinyl sleeves and tassels . . . well, let’s just say we could have bought a very nice car . . . Still striving for that “personal touch,” we then decided to use a wax seal for the invitations – we even found a dragon seal to go along with our dragon theme! It took a little practice . . . in the beginning, the dragons were nothing more than little blobs of wax. But once we got the hang of it, our invitations looked awesome! We also really wanted toasting glasses with dragons but everything we found was either very expensive or very ugly. Searching eBay in desperation, I ran across an artist who hand-paints champagne glasses with whatever design you choose – and for a very reasonable price. So reasonable, in fact, that we considered ordering glasses for all the guests too! I loved the idea , although I had visions of the artist’s hands cramping and us ending up with ten dragons and twenty tweety birds . . . As it happened, it took so long for the artist to get us just the first two glasses that if we had decided to place a large order, we would probably have needed to postpone the wedding . . . for a couple of years. In keeping with the dragon theme, we had imagined an exquisite cake top with two dragons entwined in love and happiness. Apparently, this cake top existed only in our dreams. The only thing we found that was comparable were two dragons arched to form a heart shape, available in either pewter or crystal. The crystal was especially nice . . . but the price would have added another digit to our budget. Maybe we could use a photo of our five cats as a cake topper? Choosing the wedding party was fairly simple. My daughter would be my matron of honor. My son and my brother would give me away. Planning it was easy – making it happen would take a bit of effort and money. Both of my kids live on the other side of the country and they are both “young married couples”, i.e., poor. But I was prepared to fly them out for the wedding, rent a tux for my son and buy a dress for my daughter. To make it more interesting, in February she informed me that she would be eight months pregnant in July. I quickly scratched “shop for bridesmaid dress” off my list and replaced it with “shop for tent.” I also penciled in “add doctor to guest list”, just to be on the safe side. My fiancé laughed at me because the groom has it so easy – he just grabbed his best friend and told him he was best man. They ordered the tuxes (that I selected) and their job was done. Outside of the attendants, the guest list got a bit more complicated – for me at least. I never found two concurring opinions on the subjects of who to invite from work, whether or not I had to include dates for the single guests, and how much trouble I was likely to get into if I sent invitations to a dozen people I am 100% sure would not be able to come. Four months before the wedding, my half of the guest list added up to either 15 people or 42 . . . . At one point, all we knew for certain was that our guest list included three rug rats and two curtain climbers – all of whom I hoped would be kept on a short leash (or my fiancé threatened to use them as bait). Still trying to sort out who else should get an invitation, we were faced with another dilemma. Etiquette demanded that wedding invitations either be addressed by hand or done in calligraphy. We decided to make do with my handwriting . . . which bears a strong resemblance to a kindergartner in the first week of school. I idly wondered what the etiquette book said about computer-generated mailing labels? And what is a wedding without rings? As with everything else, my fiancé knew what he didn’t like but had no clue what he did like – and very little interest in shopping to see what the choices are. With an incredible selection of rings to choose from, I did not foresee a serious problem, other than getting him off the couch . . . Getting him to look at cakes was just as much of a problem. First he told me they all looked the same. But then he pointed out half a dozen that he hated and a dozen more that he said looked like stacked hat boxes with icing. He finally pointed out two cakes with square layers that he “kinda” liked but then the next day he claimed he didn’t like square cakes because they look like suitcases. I was beginning to understand how the whole smashing-the-cake-in-the-face tradition got started – it’s REVENGE! Fortunately, we were saved by a creative cakemaker who offered to make a dragon cake for us – a blue dragon wedding cake! And then there was the star of the show: my dress – my dream! Absolutely refusing to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for an item of clothing I would only wear once – and hating the current trend of strapless-every-style-looks-the-same-as-the-other-three-hundred-styles - I actually found the dress of my dreams at a vintage shop. The perfect size and priced at only $80! Better yet – they were having a half price sale! My exquisite gown would need only one slight alteration. Shunning the common practice of having a bustle, I wanted to use an old-fashioned wrist loop for the lovely cathedral-length train. I thought it would be very flattering with the lacy, high-necked 80’s style of the dress . . . unless I accidentally swept one of the rug rats overboard . . . I smiled as I envisioned myself in ivory stockings and pearl earrings, cream-colored flowers in my upswept hair, all complimenting my delicate gown to perfection . . . All the way down to my unshod feet . . . * * *